On the first of April, 1945, a combined American and British Empire fleet appeared off Okinawa, the southernmost of the Japanese Home Islands. Operation Iceberg, the final naval battle of the Second World War, was about to begin. As hundreds of aircraft roared overhead and enormous shells fired from battleships pounded the shore, landing craft streamed ashore carrying tens of thousands of troops into battle. The battle for Okinawa is remembered as among the most savage of the Pacific Campaign, marked by extreme resistance by Japanese soldiers and civilians alike. Equally savage was the aerial battle which raged over the invasion fleet, as pilots of the Japanese Special Attack Units - better known as the kamikaze - brought their bomb-laden aircraft screaming down into the Allied ships. While by this time Allied sailors had weathered kamikaze attacks for nearly six months, the Battle of Okinawa brought with it a terrifying new threat. Just after 7:00 PM on April 1, the crew of the Colorado-class battleship USS West Virginia - a veteran of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - saw a tiny white aircraft screaming towards them at terrifying speed, a fountain of flames streaming from its tail. Though West Virginia’s gunners quickly filled the sky with a wall of tracers, the aircraft rocketed through the defensive screen and slammed into the battleship just forward of her No.2 gun director, setting off a massive explosion that killed four sailors and wounded seven. West Virginia had been struck by a Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka. Effectively a manned, rocket-propelled bomb designed for a single, one-way mission, the Ohka was one of the most ghoulish weapons of war ever devised and a perfect distillation of the sheer desperation which fuelled late-war Japan. But while the kamikazes have become infamous, less-well known is that halfway across the world, the Allied fleet which invaded Normandy in June 1944 nearly suffered a similar fate at the hands of Imperial Japan’s Axis ally, Nazi Germany. In the desperate, dying days of the Third Reich, the Nazis attempted to assemble its own kamikaze squadron, whose pilots, like modern-day viking berserkers, were to ram their jet-powered flying bombs into enemy ships and bombers, inflicting - it was hoped - such horrific casualties that the Allies would be forced to sue for peace. Thankfully, however, lack of resources and ideological differences among the German high command prevented this insane plan from being carried out. This is the story of Leonidas Squadron, the forgotten Nazi kamikazes. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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